


fly me to the moon

by PlacentaMilk



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: ? - Freeform, AU, Allura's Waluigi, Angst, Arguing, Canon Compliant, Comfort, Fighting, Heavy Angst, Hurt, M/M, Major character death - Freeform, Near Death, Not, OOOO YEA, Shiro's Potato Salad, happy happy fun times, heavy kissing, im done trying to tag this piece of shit, ok emoji hand, shiro? never heard of her, sweats, that sounds fun, uhhh, what the fuck, whatever the fuck that is
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-10
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-08-21 10:37:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16574825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlacentaMilk/pseuds/PlacentaMilk
Summary: Keith never got to say goodbye, and never really had the chance to get out the jumble of feelings that weigh on his chest. Now he has to live with it, except, he doesn't want to.





	1. It was very easy fooling you.

**Author's Note:**

> FUCK I HAVENT THOUGHT THIS THROUGH

The smoke, dirt, and debris tossed up in the air from the explosions make it really hard to see the casualties. Keith doesn't know how many people are dead, how much of this planet's civilization crumbled within just a couple of minutes. He doesn't want to think about how he let Pidge try and disarm the bombs because she said she could, but it's obvious from the wailing, from the copper in the air that she couldn't. He doesn't want to think about how she's probably just like all of the other corpses littering the desert floor.

His ears are ringing and the ground under him is still shaking from the amount of force the bombs had, and he finds it's difficult to breathe even with his helmet on. Suddenly, he wonders if he's going to die here. Then he decides that, no, he won't die here. All of the lives lost will not be in vain, Keith will personally make sure Lotor pays for this.

"Pidge?" He coughs, the dust getting past the air filters of his suit and helmet, and there's no clean air to breathe. "Pidge, please tell me you're alive," he says into the com in his helmet, using his paladin blade to help him stand up. He's wounded, pretty severely judging from the sharp pain that stabs his side and travels down his left leg, circling around his knee and cutting off there. His calf below that is numb, and as he walks forward he has to drag his left foot behind him, limping.

The ringing in his ears has cleared somewhat, the blurriness in his vision slowly ebbing away. The crying, the wailing of the aliens his team swore to protect is louder. He limps by the dead bodies, looking at them with what must be horror on his face. The crying comes from either Argathi who are still alive and stuck underneath large rocks, fallen walls from their homes, or they're coming from the Argathi who clutch their dead in their hands, their cries of anguish standing the hairs on the back of his neck. He can't help anyone here, he doesn't have the strength in him to lift the heavy walls or rocks, all he can do is pretend like he doesn't see them and march forward.

He has to find Pidge.

Wrong, he has to find everybody. Since the com seems to be dead, he can't ask his teammates - whatever's left of them - how they're doing and what their status is. He wouldn't begin to know where to find them since the blasts from the explosions threw them all outwards, but he knows the general area to look for Pidge and that's a start.

His hands aren't shaking. He refuses to acknowledge the fact that they are.

More dust seems to be getting into his helmet and he doesn't know whether taking his helmet off right now would be a smart decision or not. The Argathi don't seem bothered, but he isn't an Argathi. He keeps walking, choosing to ignore it for now. He'll deal with his damaged filters in a little bit, he has to find his teammates.

Once he gets to where the first bomb went off, it's a dramatical change from where he started and where he's at now. There were still survivors where he got blasted off his feet, here though? There's nothing but the red smog covering the sky, darkening the planet. There's no crying to be heard here, no dead bodies. The dry desert floor - which used to be a sandy red - is now burnt black. Keith knows that Pidge isn't alive. There's no way she would've survived.

He doesn't give himself false hope that maybe she got out before the bombs went off, that maybe somebody dragged her away or she was flung so far she isn't dead yet. He doesn't, because he knows there's no point in hoping after seeing how absolutely decimated this part of the planet is. The Green Paladin, his friend, has fallen. It might even be his fault, he let her try to deactivate the bombs.

He coughs but something gets stuck in his throat, the dust or particles of debris, and he almost kneels over coughing his lungs out. This time, when he coughs, blood splatters onto the glass of his helmet, and sweat is dripping off of his forehead and down his temples with the effort of not collapsing. He cringes at the blood and stands up so he can walk away from the red smog tainting the sky. When the air starts to clear and he can finally see twenty feet in front of him, he finally takes off his helmet and attaches it to his hip. "Lance? Hunk?" He calls, coughing just a bit more. His eyes scan the ground, looking over the Argathi and collapsed buildings, hoping for any flash of blue or yellow and not finding any. He knows Allura is still alive, she'd been further back than he was and he's fine. Fine-ish.

"Please," an Argathi wails near him, their large eyes trained on him and shedding crystal tears. "Help us," they cry, but Keith stays frozen in his spot. He can't do anything to help. The body that the Argathi is crying over has too much purple blood surrounding it. They're dead and he can't do anything about it. Can't give the alien a slice of hope, or help stub the grief. So after mumbling in a hoarse voice: "I can't help you," he continues to walk forward, stepping over large debris and long limbs. He feels a certain numbness, and he can't tell if it's the adrenaline or the shock.

They were never prepared for this. He can at least admit that. He failed not only his team, but an entire civilization full of aliens. The Irikan planet he stands on now has been decimated. He failed everyone as a leader.

"Paladins?!" A voice yells in the distance, and if Keith squints just enough, past the dust there's a muggy pink and white figure sprinting forward. Allura. He's never been so glad to see her, and that's including every single time he's been very, very glad, and very grateful to see her. "Allura!" he calls, but his voice gets caught in his throat again and he's coughing. The force of it knocks him over and his half-numb leg buckles underneath his weight, so he drops to his knees, coughing up blood on his already soot-covered armor. He wheezes, a deep rattling in his chest, and he knows there's liquid inside his lungs. Blood, if he has to be precise about it.

Allura sees her leader, the black paladin even though he wears red armor, collapse and just like that she's sprinting all the more faster. Jumping over the huge stone to get to him, blood rushing in her ears. Once she's by his side she's kneeling next to him, looks him over with worried eyes. She doesn't miss the blood on his legs that he just coughed up, or the blood around his mouth, in his helmet. She doesn't miss the torn armor on both his back and his leg, the skin that's been exposed to the toxic dust for far too long turning red, purple blotching up. She knows his face will look the same soon too, and then he'll be too far past saving, Galra blood or not. "Keith," she curses his name, reaching around him to grasp his helmet and un-attach it from his suit before shoving it on his head. "What the hell happened?" she asks as she helps him get up, placing a hand over the exposed skin of his back in hopes it'll help. He throws his arm around her shoulders.

"Pidge is dead," Keith starts, and the blood in Allura's veins practically freezes. Her wide blue eyes scan the area around them, looking from the fallen Argathians to the collapsed buildings. She can't believe they let this happen. "I can't find Lance or Hunk, the coms aren't working either," he wheezes, leaning more of his weight against her. It's obvious he's deteriorating by the second and Allura doesn't know what to do.

"Tell me what to do Keith," she commands, because she may be over 10,000 years old but she isn't the leader here. She's long since accepted that. "You'll die if you're out here for much longer."

"I need to find Lance, I have to," Keith says and tries to take a step forward but his leg twists and he almost collapses again. It's a wonder he made it as far as he did.

She had a feeling he would say that. "I'll find him and I'll bring him back, okay? I promise. You need to get to the castle, I called Coran-"

"No, I need-" Keith cuts himself off with a sharp cough, blood splattering over his lips. He tries his best to swallow it.

"You're dying," Allura snaps, tugging him back the way she came. Coran has one of their smaller fighter jets waiting. He'll be able to stim Keith's deteriorating health until she finds Lance and Hunk. With a small thought, she hopes she'll find Katie's body. She can't imagine Matt's grief when they tell him his sister is dead and they don't even have the body. She doesn't dwell on the thoughts, refuses to let panic take over so soon. They have over a thousand Argathi dead, a fallen paladin, another paladin swiftly approaching death, and the other two paladins missing. She needs to find her friends, her teammates, and then she can worry about damage control.

Keith can't really fight against her in this state and it's not like he could if he wasn't dying anyway, she's always been ten times stronger than any of them. Maybe a little less against Keith, since he isn't just human, but that's beside the point. He practically collapses against her and lets her drag her past all the rubble and to the waiting fighter jet. Coran is waiting anxiously, and as soon as Allura gives him the black paladin, she's sprinting back the way she came, back towards the crying city.

She helps whatever Argathi she can as she finds her way through the fallen, looking for her teammates. Uses her strength to lift fallen houses and pull bodies out, but most of them are dead anyway. The purple blood tells her that.

"Lance! Hunk!" She yells as she switches constantly between walking and running. She doesn't know how close the two were to the blast, but Keith had been a little bit back and he's currently dying, she can't imagine the state the two are in.

"Allura?!" A voice echoes from the left of her, and her neck practically snaps as she turns to look at where the sound came from. It sounded like Hunk, so she starts running again, forgetting about the Argathi lying around her. She can't lose more Paladin's, she can't lose more friends. It'll be the end of her stable mind, and she doesn't even want to think of what it would mean for Voltron.

She vaults herself over a particularly large rock and shouts, "Hunk?!"

She continues sprinting past the fallen buildings, past the holes in the ground, past all the blood, until she hears him sobbing right next to her. The building he's trapped in has a wall blocking the entrance, leaned into the house. It's taken half of both the front wall and side wall down with it, and Allura fears for the worst. That he's trapped in there, his legs stuck and she won't be able to get him out or something horrible like that. She swallows her fear back and pushes at the stone wall from the side, it being too heavy to lift. "I'm here Hunk!" She calls through the wall as she continues to push, using all of her strength until it gives way and lets her slip past the barricade.

Hunk is inside, sobbing hysterically, with-

"Katie!" Allura gasps, running forward and practically sliding to her knees next to the two. "Oh my god, is she-?"

Hunk shakes his head and stutters out a sob again, hand over his mouth to try and stifle it. His eyes are impossibly sad, and it almost makes Allura burst into tears. She looks back down at the green paladin, eyes scanning over her body analytically. The entire torso of her armor is torn off and her skin is red, raw and bleeding. Burns covering the entirety of her chest. Her helmet is still on but the glass is broken and gone, Allura can see her face slowly turning a light shade of purple. She reaches out and grabs both of the smaller girls shoulders, a blue light emitting from where their skin touches. She's using her magic to see if she's alive.

Allura feels it, very, very faintly. The trickle of Pidge's own life force, her essence slowly slipping away from her. Allura won't be able to make it in time back to the jet, and even if she could, Coran wouldn't be able to help her or have enough time to make it back to the castle and throw her in a healing pod.

Hunk is still sobbing next to her, his face looking ashen and defeated as he sobs. She vaguely notices Hunk's leg trapped between the ground and fallen stone. She'll help him in a minute, the rock is helping keep all of his blood inside of him where it needs to be. She turns back to Pidge.

She can help her, Allura knows this. She helped bring Lance back to life what seems like centuries ago, she can do the same for Katie. Hunk watches with blurry eyes as her face sets into determination. She will help Katie. She has to.

The blue light between Allura's palm and Pidge's skin glows even brighter, and Allura closes her eyes in concentration. It hits her again, not for the first time, how fickle her human friend's lives are.

Allura can't help Pidge heal her wounds, that would take too much out of her and she still has to find Lance and get the four of them to the jet, but she can give Pidge some of her own essence. She can - quite literally - breathe life back into her.

So she does. Keith believed Katie to be dead, and Allura is going to sorely prove him wrong.

Pidge doesn't wake up, but she seems to actually be breathing now, and the purple that was slowly creeping up her face has retreated. Allura knows that won't last for long though, she needs to get them back to the jet but she doesn't know how long Katie will last out there being so exposed to the toxic red dust still floating in the air. "Hunk, where's Lance?" She asks quickly as she takes off her own helmet. She'll survive longer than her human friends, she just needs to be quick in finding the blue paladin.

"I-I don't know," Hunk stutters, still crying. He had lost Lance before the bombs went off, Lance knew what was going to happen and he had the choice of either staying in safety with Hunk or going out to find Pidge and get her the hell away from where she was trying to deactivate the bombs. Hunk knows which one he wanted to do, but he also knows which one was more important, and Lance knew that too. "He went to go find Pidge," Hunk tells her. It's obvious he never did.

Allura nods solemnly. She doesn't want to think about what that means. "Okay, okay," she mumbles to herself and crawls around the Green Paladin's unconscious body to get to Hunk, the low ceiling not giving her much room to move. She looks at his leg that's trapped under the stone, and there's absolutely no way he'll be able to walk on it, that much she knows.

"Just. Do what you have to do," Hunk sounds like he's about to vomit, and when Allura looks up at him, she finds his usual flushed skin ashen, drained. He's looking at Pidge and Allura shoots a look at her as well. Except, he's not looking at her.

He's looking at her Bayard. "Hunk, we can get you to a healing pod," she says, her eyebrows furrowing.

"It'll take too long to get there," he says. "I'll bleed out before then, just... Do it, Allura."

Pidge's Bayard is too small to cut through Hunk's leg, they both know that, but he wants her to try anyway. She shakes her head and unclasps her own Bayard from her suit, the blue Bayard turning into a whip as she thinks of it. "I'll cauterize it, I'm not removing your leg Hunk."

For the next ten minutes, she removes the stone and cauterizes his wounds. He does his best to not scream at first but he bites through his tongue and the screaming starts. It's horrible, the smell of burning flesh, and Hunk almost retches twice. He's passed out by the time that she's done, her glowing whip cutting through the gloves of her suit and cutting into her hands.

She's strong enough to carry them both back to the jet, but not at the same time. She drags Katie out first, since she's more exposed to the toxic dust, and then she's running again with Pidge in her arms.

When she comes back for Hunk, she has to drag him the entire the way because her energy is waning, but that's okay because he's safe in Coran's ship, and Coran promises to get them to the pods in the castle and come back as quickly as he can.

-

Allura is sprinting towards where the first blast was, the most deadly one. Where Pidge had been disarming the bomb. She doesn't know how Pidge survived, or got to where she was, but Allura counts her stars and continues down the rocky terrain. She isn't finished. She promised Keith she would bring Lance back, and she intends on keeping that promise.

When she gets to the blast site, she sees exactly what Keith did. She can feel the red smog tugging at her lungs but she's perseverant and she has a duty. Not only to her leader and her teammates, but to her friends, to herself.

The ground is scorched black and she can't see that far in front of her. She decides to double back, just outside the smog cloud because she thinks - just as Keith thought - there's no way Lance would've survived in there. Even if he was dead, his body would've been flung, so she patrols the outside of the blast site. "Lance?" She calls, jogging around. She needs to get back to the jet, but she refuses to leave without the blue paladin.

To her right, she hears the faintest groan, her ears picking up on it easily. She turns to face the sound and jogs towards it, towards the pile of rubble, rocks and broken up walls collapsed on one another.

She gasps as she rounds the huge collapse. There, in between an opening, she can see Lance crushed below the rocks. His helmet has practically bent like soft clay beneath the weight of the sharp rock above him, and so the rock has smashed in the back of his head, the brain exposed to the floor. There's too much blood and suddenly the calm Allura forced herself to have, the panic she stored away is rising up to the surface and her hands start shaking.

Lance's eyes, once electric blue like the oceans on Altea, are clouded over and staring into her own, which are watering up with tears.

She feels like vomiting.

Suddenly she realizes that this isn't real. It's not, she recognizes the pull on her mind distantly and before the witch can realize she's been found out, Allura has her spear in her hands, extending it. She snarls, her lips curling back and her sharp teeth being shown, before she's taking the spear in both hands and bringing it down onto Lance's already caved in head, stabbing him through his temple.

He doesn't disappear, though. Her spear stabs through him, the disgusting cracking sound of his skull breaking underneath her force. She stumbles backward only slightly before dropping to her knees. No, she could've sworn this was an illusion, she-

"You know," a deep voice drawls, and Allura realizes it wasn't the witch Haggar like she thought it had been. "Watching you all run around like Lechwe's with your heads cut off is highly entertaining."

Lotor steps out from the smog cloud, a smug grin on his face. She turns her wide watery eyes on him, her whirlwind of emotions clashing inside of her. She settles for angry. Lotor took her entire civilization. Her parents, her people, her home, and now he's taken Lance's life. She stands up, her eyes locked on his lithe, relaxed form. She'll kill him, right here and right now, she decides.

"I helped you," she starts, grabbing her spear still stuck in Lance's head as she rises from her knees. She all but tears it out of him and turns it on the prince in front of her. "I taught you about your Altea heritage. I helped you learn to wield your magic," she spits, raising her spear above her head and swinging it at him, letting the small spearheads change into long blades as she thinks of it. She doesn't hit him, he dances backward as if they were playing a game.

"And I used you," Lotor smiles and she nearly screams out of anger before charging forward once again, bringing her spear down onto him. "You can't make me feel guilty about something that I planned for a very, very long time. It was very easy fooling you."

She can't believe she almost married this asshole for a truce between their species. There will never be a truce, she thinks as a certain fire rages in her eyes. She swings at him again, her hair beginning to fall out of its neat bun, and she must look crazed. She feels like it.

Lotor only laughs at her sad attempts before disappearing back into the smog, and she follows him but more explosions happen in the distance behind her, smaller ones. She's torn between following Lotor, trying to pry Lance's corpse out from underneath the rocks, or finding out what the smaller explosions were about. Hasn't Lotor done enough?

As she runs back into town, she finds that the smaller explosions weren't Lotor's doing at all. She watches with horrified eyes as the Argathi's crystal tears fall off their faces and react with the red smog, the toxic dust creeping in, and they explode.

She can't help anyone here. For the first time since her father shut her in a cryo-pod to protect her, she feels utterly helpless.


	2. Chapter 2

-

Five days.

It takes five days for just one of the paladin's to step out of the cryo-pod. That's five, lonely days that Allura locks herself into her room. She had tried to help the Argathians, but their crystalized tears ended up killing the rest of the aliens that were alive. The Argathian civilization crumbled within ten minutes, and within thirty, their entire population dwindled to zero. Coran hadn't said much to her, hadn't tried consoling her. She wouldn't let him.

The entirety of Voltron, aside from her, are in cryo-pods. Never mind their fallen paladin, who she couldn't recover the body of.

She doesn't try thinking about how she had stabbed through his skull with her spear, either.

Keith's cryo-pod opens with a silent hiss, and he steps forward lethargically. He plans to take another one, but his left leg doesn't seem to want to cooperate with him and his knee locks, causing him to stumble. There's no one there to catch him and he falls to his knees harshly, bruising them.

His hands come out to catch himself before he completely faceplants into the cold ground, and he winces. He doesn't know why there's no one in front of him, ready to welcome back to the world of the living, and he can't begin to think of the reasons why, so instead he sits there for a moment. He opens his eyes to see the cold ground beneath him, the lights of the medical bay dimmed. It must be nighttime on the ship, then.

He stands up, his left leg shaking beneath his weight. It hurts, but he ignores it. He just stepped out of the cryo-pod, if 10,000-year-old technology can't help him, then he'll just have to deal with it on his own. He steps forward slowly, taking his time and resting all of his weight on his right foot. He turns to looks behind him, at the pods next to his. Hunk is in the one right next to his, and-

All the air leaves his lungs and he pushes himself forward, stumbling over to her pod, left leg still not really working with him. He stumbles up to it, his hands coming up to rest on the glass. He had thought she was dead. She _should've_ been dead. There was no way she couldn't be, but here she is. In front of him, in a cryo-pod. He refused to give himself hope that she'd been alive, he told Allura that Pidge was dead.

He might cry. Tears are, in fact, stinging his eyes.

It's obvious she was hurt badly, he can see that from where the black suit that they keep on underneath their armor is ripped across her chest. He doesn't know how long he's been in the pod but he guesses it wasn't for long, because there's still burn marks encompassing her chest, her exposed shoulders. The skin is raised and taut, red with anger. It's not as bad as he thought it would be, or, at least, it's not bad anymore.

Keith turns his watery eyes to Hunk and hobbles over, looking over him as well. He doesn't look too hurt, except for his leg. His leg looks really bad, actually, and Keith looks away before he can actually think about what the boiled, burnt skin means.

They all went through the grinder, apparently.

It doesn't fly over his head that Lance isn't in the pods, so he can only hope that either Lance was fine, or he was hurt and got out of the pods before Keith did. So, with that in mind, Keith is hobbling out of the med bay. He makes his way to the command room first, and after looking at what time it is on the ship, 16 Varga, he makes his way to the kitchens. No one is awake and Keith supposes he'll go sleep his cryo-pod stasis off as well, but he's so inexplicably thirsty that sleep can wait.

The lights in the kitchen brighten when the door slides open and he enters, but not by much. He's immediately frozen in his tracks at the sound of something rummaging through - what honestly sounds like trash - around the island in the middle of the room. "Who's there?" He asks, his voice hoarse and raspy. He might've been in the pod longer than he thought, he can't really tell.

The rummaging stops at the sound of his voice and everything in the kitchen is still. He wonders for a moment if they have an intruder on the ship, but then-

A yip and Kosmo is teleporting in front of Keith. Normally the cosmic wolf would've jumped into his arms at this point and brought him crashing down to the ground, but she's far too intelligent for her own good, so instead, she just nudges at Keith's left leg with her snout and looks up at him with her bright yellow eyes. All tension drains out of Keith's body and he narrows his eyes at the blue wolf. "Were you doing what I think you were doing?"

The only response he gets is a slight gesture, her tilting her head down slightly - her saying that she's sorry. Her eyes are still on his, though, so she's really not. He rolls his own at her and scoots past her, towards the fridge installed in the wall. "I'm only here for-"

With another yip, he hears the crack of her teleporting, and then teleporting again right in front of him. She holds a water pack in her mouth. "Thanks," he mummers before grabbing it and proceeding to chug all of it within a matter of seconds.

One more water pack and a handful of seconds later, Kosmo has teleported them to his room. More specifically? On top of his bed. "I could've walked, you know," he says to the wolf, but her eyes drop to his left leg and she tilts her head at it, saying in her own way, _"Sure you could've."_

Again, too intelligent for her own good.

He loves her, though, and she curls up at the foot of the bed as he lies down. He isn't really exhausted, but as soon as his head hits the pillow he's out like a light.

-

Kosmo teleports him to the bathroom when he wakes up in the morning, saying in a not so subtle way that he stinks. Afterward she teleports him back to his bedroom, and basically, she refuses to let him walk if she can help it.

Sue her, her human was injured and continues to be. She's only stayed by the side of the bravest of warriors, and hers might be brave but he's also stupid. Sometimes.

"Keith!" Allura gasps when he teleports into the kitchen, Kosmo at his side. She drops something that looks vaguely like burnt toast, but goopy, and blue. So maybe nothing like burnt toast at all. "I didn't know you were out of the pod!" And just like that, she's right next to him and hugging him tightly.

Keith can see over Allura's shoulder that Kosmo's gone up to the counter that Allura dropped the food-like-thing and is currently drooling over it. Before Allura can turn to face the wolf and scold her, Kosmo is hopping up onto her hind legs and snatching it off the counter with her mouth, gobbling it within seconds. She hacks afterward, drawing Allura's attention to her. "You weren't supposed to eat that!" She scolds, letting go of Keith in favor of walking up to the wolf to stand over her with her arms crossed in that condescending way that Allura often does.

Allura looks frazzled. She doesn't look like herself, she doesn't glow her usual Altean glow, her ears seem droopy. Or, at least, that's what Coran would say. "How long was I in the pod?" He asks, because it's a question that's been bugging him since last night.

"Five quintants, give or take!" Coran announces himself as he walks into the room, answering Keith's question. "The pod said you wouldn't be out until noon, it's nice to see you looking well Keith."

Kosmo barks at this and she's back by Keith's side, bumping into his left leg that he can't quite walk on yet. He ignores her. "What happened to the Argathi? Did Lance help you relocate them?" Keith's violet eyes turn on Allura, and suddenly she looks glum. If he had thought she didn't look like her normal, strong and happy self, then he wonders what to think of her now as she stands in front of him and wrings her hands. Coran's gone quiet, too.

"Yes, I suppose... I should give you an update on what happened."

That tone doesn't sit well with Keith, and it never has in all their time spent together. It means something bad happened.

The three walk to the control room, because it's Buisness and Allura likes all meetings to be in the control room. It's difficult to walk, Keith finds, even still. His leg hasn't gotten any better, what with staying off of it and letting Kosmo teleport him around the castle. There's a certain stabbing pain that travels down his thigh, and if he moves too sharply his foot tingles with numbness for a couple seconds before subsiding. Coran tries commenting on it but Keith has a feeling he's just trying to delay the bad news, and Keith's always liked ripping the band-aid off quickly.

Allura steps up to her console and brings up the hologram of the Vega Mizar System, zooming in to the Irikan planet so it hovers in the air between the three of them. "As we know," she starts out, sighing, "Bombs went off in several places around the Argathian's city. The main one, as I'm sure you saw, Keith, had absolutely decimated what life was around it. I found Hunk and Pidge in a collapsed building not too far from the site." She skips the gory details of cauterizing Hunk's wounds closed, because that's all they are, gory. But she hesitates to get to the next part, because she doesn't want to say it. Her eyes dart to Coran's, who gives her a slight nod, and then she's continuing. "After getting Pidge and Hunk to Coran, I went to the original blast site. Hunk had told me that Lance went out to find Pidge, so I knew he was somewhere around there... I saw the red smog and decided to double back around the perimeter of it and... Lance was buried beneath a pile of stone. He was dead."

Keith's face, whatever color his fair skin held, is drained immediately. His arms that have been crossed since she started the briefing loosen, and she can practically see his mind work. To drive it home, because she's cruel but mostly because she doesn't want Keith to hope for anything else, she states it once more. "Lance is dead, Keith."

Keith's chest tightens, aches. It's not even like he can pretend to be indifferent about it, can pretend he's not as hurt about this as he is. He hadn't even got to tell him-

"What about his body?" Keith asks, refusing to let his voice waver. His mind is racing but he can't think at the same time. He remembers imaging what he was going to tell Matt, how he was going to tell him that his little sister is dead and it's Keith's fault. Now he's imagining how he's going to tell Hunk that his childhood bestfriend died trying to find Pidge, and never mind Pidge. Hunk's going to cry because he's always been a crier, but Pidge will bottle up her feelings and spiral into denial, just like she did with Matt, just like she did with her father, just like with Shiro.

Allura shakes her head. "I couldn't bring him back."

"And the Argathians?"

"They're all dead. None of them survived."

It's a massive failure, on all of them. Not only on him, as leader of Voltron, but Voltron as a whole has failed an entire alien race. He'll still shoulder all the blame, though.

"Their tears," Allura continues, "crystallized and reacted with the toxic dust from the main bomb. I couldn't save any of them." Keith nods, no longer meeting Allura's eyes, looking down. He wants to say he doesn't know where they went wrong, as a team, as Voltron. He wants to think that they couldn't have done anything differently. It wasn't even one of the witches monsters, they were just bombs. He knows it shouldn't have happened. He knows that he doesn't feel right about what happened, not just the deaths, but the way it happened doesn't sit right with him.

"Lotor was there, when I went to find Lance," Allura practically breathes it like she doesn't want to let it out of her lungs, because she knows Keith well enough by now, and with his impulse control gone? She has to tell him, though. He's Voltron's leader. "He didn't even really try to attack me, but I pulled my weapon on him. He disappeared before I could hurt him, or bring him in." What she doesn't mention is she never had thoughts of bringing him in to answer for his crimes. For the death that he brought down on their heads. She had only thought of bringing his own, and she would've done it. Had she had more time, she would've severed his head from his neck.

Keith still doesn't say anything, still doesn't look up. Just gives raises his chin in a slight jerk, a nod, but not really agreeing with anything just letting her know he's listening. His mind is reeling, trying to take in the information but not processing it. "I'm sorry, Keith," registers in his mind but only barely. It sticks for a second before its gone with the rest of his thoughts and he finds that he can't really focus on anything.

"Can we go back? And get his body?" He asks but his voice is small and he doesn't like it. _He_ feels small.

Coran starts shaking his head in disagreement out of the corner of his eye. "We went back with the tools to retrieve his body but he wasn't there."

At this, Keith looks up, and this is what Allura wanted to avoid. This is why she said that Lance was dead twice, because she isn't cruel when it comes to her friends but the hope hidden in the darkness of Keith's eyes is for nothing. She knows better than anyone that Lance is dead. When Keith opens his mouth to speak, she cuts him off swiftly. "Keith, I want to show you something, come with me."

It's not the best thing to do, not at all, not by any means, and she shouldn't do it but she knows that no matter how she words it, no matter how many different ways she can phrase it, he won't see what she felt. The only thing he'll see, is that she killed their friend, and there won't be any thinking beyond that.

So, she leads him to the training room.

"What are we doing, Allura?" He asks when she continues walking forward to the middle of the room. She doesn't answer them, instead, she goes to the furthest wall and presses on the white metal, the space between her hand and the wall glowing a faint blue. A minute later, he can hear mechanics whirr as a small secton of the wall slides out. She grabs something that he can't make out from across the room, and then she's turning her back on it and walking back towards him.

What she hands him is a small cube that reminds him when they first mind-linked and had to think of their homes or happy places. "Another one of these?" He asks, eyebrows furrowing. Why the hell would Allura want to show him this?

"Not necessarily, they work differently. Instead of projecting an image from your mind, establishing a link between you and the paladins, it... well, it basically does that, form a link from my mind to yours, but differently. You'll see." She looks nervous and he doesn't like it, doesn't like the piece of advanced technology in his hands. "I want you to just relax, okay? I have to show you something."

He nods, although hesitantly, and closes his eyes. Tries to relax.

Allura does the same, and she faintly recognizes the cube pulsing with energy before she's plummeted deep into her mind, Keith being tugged along with her.

They float through her memories together, her, immediately darting towards the one he needs to see. Keith, feeling weightless in the void of her mind, bobbing behind her like a balloon and trying to get glimpses of the images that flash past and trying to make sense of them. He sees himself in the very beginning, looking down with his arms crossed, looking deflated. A feeling of sadness washes over him with that one, but it's not his own, it's different. It's hurt. Hurting for a friend who lost someone.

There's another one of him, in the kitchen, not that long ago. The feeling that accompanies that one is warmth, happiness, but nervousness as well. She had been nervous to see him, he realizes, and now that he knows why; he understands.

She delves further into her memories and the past couple of days of her life pass in a blur, all harboring one emotion - grief. Suddenly, he knows why she wanted him to follow her here, and he doesn't want to see it. He doesn't want to know what she felt like when she saw Lance's corpse, he doesn't want to _know_. But whether or not she can pick up on his own emotions, she doesn't stop, just continues hurdling toward that memory that he doesn't want to see. He tries closing his eyes to stop it but he doesn't have any here to close, he doesn't have a way to block himself from seeing this.

They stop moving, and the blackness with images flashing by turns into red. He's in the middle of the red smog. Immediately his body is moving on his own accord, jogging forward, and he realizes belatedly that he's in Allura's body. He _is_ Allura in her memory, he's experiencing it just as she did, not just getting a feel of her emotions, but feeling them as _himself_.

He can't breathe.

"Lance?!" He calls, but it's not his voice, it's Alluras. The red dust clears in the air as they jog back to where the air is breathable, and they pace back and forth for a couple minutes, calling the blue paladin's name. He feels a sense of urgencey, knows he needs to get back to the jet but refusing to leave without Lance.

His ears pick up on the groan to his right easily and he turns, seeing the pile of rocks, rubble, debris stacked upon eachother and jogging towards it. He was so sure that the sound was coming from here-

He rounds the rocks and stops in his tracks at what he sees. No, he doesn't want to see it. _Allura, I'm begging you, I don't want to see it, I don't want to see it, I don't want to see it._ His brain is exposed, red coating the floor, the rock crushing his skull, his armor. The sudden calm he has - Allura has - is gone and he's panicking. In his mind a voice echos around; _"Lance's eyes... oh his eyes... they once reminded me of the oceans on Altea and now-"_

The shock registers in his mind before anything else and suddenly he's on alert. He knows that this is a trick somehow, it's not real. He's so certain it's not real, it feels too much like magic, and before the witch that must be lingering around here somewhere knows they've been found out, he's extending his spear and driving it down into Lance's skull with a snarl, waiting for the image infront of him to fall away like mist, never really there.

But it doesn't. It doesn't, instead, his spear goes straight through Lance's temple, what remains of his unbroken skull breaking and crunching underneath the weight and power he throws behind it. It's not an illusion. No, he could've sworn-

He stumbles backwards and falls to his knees, his heart breaking into a million different pieces. Both his own and Allura's.

Suddenly, he's being ripped out of the memory, back into the real world. He drops the cube and stumbles backward, the nasuea from Allura's memory following him out. He's going to vomit, he can't look away from the image thats burned on the back of his eyelids no matter how many times he tries to blink it away. He stumbles further away from Allura, hearing the cube crack on the floor and undeniably break, before he's turning his back towards her and dry heaving. The ache in his chest that restricts his heart in a painful way is worse than it was before, now he can't deny that Lance is dead, now he has to face the truth and-

He vomits, but only in the back of his throat. It burns and tears are stinging his eyes, sweat beading up around his forehead, beginning to trail down the sides of his temples slowly. _God_ , he thinks, _temples_. Lance's temples and his spear and- his bad leg finally gives out on his shaky weight and he collapses to the ground, hands coming out to catch him. "Why," he rasps out, past the dry heaving. "Why would you... show me that?" he asks, but the answer comes to him as he says it. There, in Allura's memories, was him again. Back in the control room, and he no longer looks a little deflated, instead he's standing straighter, a small gleam in his own eyes that make Allura wince, because there is no hope for Lance. He hadn't just... gotten up and walked somewhere else, he was dead and she made sure of that, but she had to show him because... he would never see her as anything more than a murderer without knowing what she felt. Knowing the feeling of magic being placed in her head. 

Felt it, he did, and he doesn't hate her for... that. But he does hate her for making him _see_  Lance like that, making him _feel_ what she felt. "I didn't want that, I didn't want to see-" his voice cracks and he squeezes his eyes shut, trying to get rid of the tears.

Allura doesn't say anything, but he hears her footsteps behind him, and it's a moment of her standing there, looking down at him, before she kneels next to him and places a hand on his shoulder. It doesn't register at first, but her hands are also shaking.


	3. Chapter 3

Hunk is the next one out of the pods. His leg that looked like it was thrown into a boiler looks tremendously better, all that's left behind is scar tissue. He's able to walk on it fine - something Keith is still not able to do with his own leg.

Hunk is all soft- almost tired smiles until Allura walks into the room and he notices her. Then he's practically hugging the life out of her, crushing her to his chest, but she takes it in stride and her bright smile is something Keith hasn't seen since he woke up. "Hunk!" She exclaims, laughing when he lifts her off the ground. When he puts her down, he has tears in his eyes, and Keith almost wishes Allura had shown him whatever happened between her and Hunk instead of...

"Thank you, Allura, really. I still have my leg!" He says when he looks down to it, flexing his foot up before resting it back on the ground. He looks behind him, then, because Pidge isn't there to hug him and she must be in the pods. "And Pidge is alive!" Hunk walks up to her pod, looking up at her with wide, watery eyes. Keith felt the same way, when he first saw her.

Keith watches with arms crossed as Allura goes tense at Pidge's name, smile still on her face. Because next after Pidge is Lance, and he's not there to crack jokes about Hunk being in the cryo-pod, nor is he in one of the pod's himself, and- Hunk turns around to face the three of them, eyebrows furrowing when he realizes Lance is nowhere to be found. "Where's...?" Hunk trails off, hesitant.

Hunk isn't oblivious, he never has been, and they didn't talk about how they were going to break it to the yellow paladin, or when, but Allura is shaking her head sadly and that's all Hunk has to know. "What?" He asks, dejectedly.

"Lance... I- He was dead when I found him. There was no saving him." Allura says, drawing Hunk's big brown teary eyes away from Keith, who looks as closed off as he used to be back in the beginning. Hiding in his shell.

"No," Hunk denies, but that's all he says. The tears come next, trailing down his face, and Keith doesn't know how to deal with it so he leaves the room. He can't even deal with his own feelings, much less Hunks.

Allura steps forward to comfort the other, her hand coming up to land on his shoulder. "I'm so sorry, Hunk," she whispers, and that makes him cry all the more. Who was going to have sleepovers with him now? What about Lance's family? What was Hunk going to say to Lance's mom when he and Pidge come back without her son? Oh, god.

"What's going to happen to Voltron?"

If Allura is shocked by the question, she barely shows it. She didn't expect that to be the first question to come out of Hunk's mouth. So, she presses her lips together in thought and lifts a shoulder in a half-shrug. "We'll find another red paladin, just like we did when Shiro disappeared." And that's what's going to have to happen. Because they got lucky last time, Blue had chosen Allura and Red had accepted Lance, but they don't have an extra person this time.

Eventually, Hunk cries himself out and can't function anymore, so he retires to his room to get some sleep, maybe take a shower before that. When Allura walks into the control room, Keith is there, sitting in the Black paladin chair. She eyes him for a moment before going to the main control board, checking for different things like warnings, Galra cruisers nearby. "What are we going to tell Pidge?" Keith's voice comes drifting to her, and if she did not have better ears she might've not heard him.

"The same thing. We can't hide it from her," Allura says after a moment, waving the holograms in front of her face away and stepping around the console to walk up to him. He doesn't look at her, instead looking at the stars in front of them, the bright blue nebula a distance away.

"You know how she is with loss." Is all he says.

And she does know, they all do. "We all saw how she reacted with her family on the line, with Shiro being gone, and even when you left us too, yes." At the last part, Keith's eyebrows furrow and he looks up at the woman standing next to him. "But she has to know..." Allura trails off, crouching down to sit on the floor next to his chair, staring out at the stars. "Keith... I never apologized. For your grief. For showing you what I did. If I could go back and change something, anything that would bring Lance back, I would," she says and looks up at him, her bright blue eyes looking at his.

Keith... has never been good with heart to hearts. Doesn't know what to say, how to react. He just gives a short nod. "I would too," he says quietly, but the truth is everybody would go back and change something if they could. He knows she would, just like he knows Hunk or Pidge would. Coran. Shiro, if he were still here. The list of people who love Lance is long, Keith is sure.

They sit in silence for a couple minutes, no longer looking at each other but at the space around them, the twinkling stars, faraway planets. Asteroids drifting by. Keith never spent much time alone in the rooms with high windows, looking out at the endless void around them, but he had caught Lance a couple times doing so. He always seemed so lost in his own world when he sat in front of the windows, knees pressed up to his chest. Always seemed so small. The two times he had actually noticed Keith standing in the doorway, his cheeks had flushed with a deep red from embarrassment or something like it, and he had left the room, shoving his way past Keith mumbling something under his breath that, although Keith heard, he couldn't understand it.

He had never gotten to stop and ask Lance what he had said.

"I... often wonder what I  _could've_  done, if I had half the chance. I would like to imagine I could've done lots of different things, but honestly, Keith? I don't think any of us could've done anything. If you had asked my father, he would've told you something poetic about fate," she huffs a laugh, a bittersweet smile on her face. "I don't think it was Lance's fate to die there."

Keith agrees, and then he's brought back to how he felt wrong about what had happened. "Actually, Allura?" He asks, turning towards her in his chair. "The entire thing, the explosives, Lotor being there but not attacking us, feels  _wrong_  to me."

And Keith may be a lot of things but he has good gut instincts, Allura knows when to follow. "What do you mean?"

"Well, the fact that they were bombs, for starters. When has the Galra ever used bombs against us as a beginning attack? There were no soldiers, no battlecruisers, none of their monsters either, just explosives. That makes no sense," he says.

Allura nods, eyebrows furrowed as she thinks about it. It doesn't make sense. "Well, the explosives certainly had druid magic in it, within seconds of you being exposed to it you were coughing up blood and your skin was turning purple." He grimaces, because yes, he certainly remembers. "They were meant to kill us."

Keith goes quiet and thinks about it. Yeah, they had druid magic in them, and if it weren't for Allura being there to pull them out, she would've been the only paladin left standing. "Bombs, though. I don't know, it doesn't sit well with me. They aren't one for stealth..."

Allura's eyes widen, turning on him. "They're brutes, that's what the Galra are. They're strong, malicious, and bloodthirsty. They don't use stealth. The only people we know that do are the Blades, but they've been with us since the start so it doesn't make sense that it would be them." And although she says this, the way her eyes are widened says that she's contemplating the option. "Do you think-"

"No, I worked with them, they hate Zarkon and Lotor. They want to bring the Galra empire down, and just like you said, they've been with us from the start. It has to be someone else."

"So there's someone else in the game, then, and they aren't on our side..." Allura trails off.

-

"I agree," Hunk yawns, shuffling his way to his chair with a plate full of breakfast in hand. It isn't green goo, instead, it's some berries, fruit plucked from a planet named something or other a couple months back. He also has some smoked hog on his plate, cut like bacon, and they haven't had smoked hog in a long time. Hunk says he cooks when he's stressed, or sad. Nobody questioned him. "Explosives aren't a Galra thing, and even Pidge had said something about it but none of us questioned it, we were too busy, you know, trying to get the civilians away from the blast sites... and failing... miserably... So, what, you guys think it's the Blades?" He asks, eyebrows furrowing as he uses a spork to eat the fruit.

Allura shakes her head, sitting in her chair with her hands folded on top of each other on the table. She had already eaten, and instead chose this time to fill in Hunk. "Not until we talk to Pidge, she had seen the bombs up close and she can tell us what they looked like. From that, Keith can tell us whether or not they were the same type of explosives that the Blades use. But we don't think it's them, they've been allied with us since they knew Voltron was active again."

"Sounds like a lot of detective work to me!" Coran announces himself as he walks in. He looks dirty, covered in grease or something similar to it.He has a rag that looks like it used to be white but is now black in his hands, and he all but flings it into the garbage. "If you ask me, it just sounds like they're trying to confuse us! We must remain vigilant," he says as he walks further and further from them, into the kitchen. "Back when your father was alive and Zarkon was part of Voltron, he always liked rushing into combat and using melee, they never thought of ambushing enemies with explosives."

Allura's eyebrows draw together as she tries to hear what Coran is saying, now that he's walked so far away, but she gives up before he's done talking. "Anyway," she starts, turning back towards the two paladins in front of her. "If this person- or these people do turn out to be the Blades, they either have a spy in their midst or... they've turned on us. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Pidge should be out soon, and we'll be able to speak to her then."

Hunk nods, chewing his food thoughtfully, eyes cast downwards. The silence stretches between the three of them, Keith has nothing to say, thinks that they've covered just about everything, and Allura is done filling Hunk in. "What about Lance?" he asks eventually, though, from the way he takes so long to speak, it's almost like he didn't want to ask in the first place.

Allura and Keith share a glance, both thinking the same thing. Hunk must be wondering the same thing Keith did, is there a body? Do we have a funeral for him? There's not even a place to bury Lance if they had the body, no special place anyway. No special planets besides Earth, and there's a reason they haven't traveled back yet, it would take too long. "What about him?" Allura asks, her fingers fidgeting on top of the table.

Hunk is silent for another moment, thinking. He doesn't know what to ask regarding Lance, doesn't know where to start. "Is... Can we bring his body back? To his family on Earth? I know his mom would want to bury the body on their land, hold a funeral for him..."

The Princess shakes her head, lips pressing together in a thin and sad line. "No, we couldn't recover his body, but we will have a funeral for him, and then, with Altean tradition, Coran and I would like to hold a celebration. Celebrating his life, what he accomplished, and how he helped us with the war."

Keith doesn't really listen, sitting back in his chair, but he feels sick. _"His body,"_ this, and _"his body,"_ that. Lance has always been more than a shell of a body, and even in death, he remains so. Lance is a lot of things, but a simple _"body"_ is not one of them. Keith doesn't bother mumbling his excuses as he stands up from the table and walks out of the dining room. He really doesn't want to be part of the conversation.

He doesn't know where he's going, doesn't have a specific place in mind, he mostly just wants to get away from Hunk's questions that he already knows the answers to. He thinks about going and training, but the twinge of hurt in his leg tells him not to and he listens, for once, to his own pain.

He finds himself standing in front of Lance's room.

Keith doesn't even realize he's standing in front of Lance's room until he moves to go into his own and realizes the door isn't there, on the right wall, but instead there's a door behind him, on the left. Lance's room. He turns to face it, and although it's just a door, although he can't see what lies behind it, he feels... fearful, maybe. Feels stuck to his spot, rooted in place in the middle of the corridor. It's almost like he can't breathe, and for once in the entire time he's lived on the castle, he feels claustrophobic in the corridor. Like the walls are closing in on him. He won't go in there, it doesn't make sense for him to anyway, he's never seen the inside of Lance's room and he won't now just because he's...

There's a crack and a yip, and suddenly Kosmo is at his feet, tearing Keith out of his thoughts. She circles around his legs before coming to stop at his side, taking a look at the door he's frozen in front of and then back up to him, yellow eyes trained on him.

Keith lets out a breath he didn't know he was holding and looks down at the wolf, realizing she must've sensed his distress or something like that. "I'm fine," he brushes off the wolf and starts back down the corridor, the way he came, planning to actually go to his room this time. Kosmo trots behind him, letting him walk on his own despite the pain in his leg. When he gets to his room, he wants to take a shower or actually do something, but all he does is sit on his bed and hunch forward, his elbows on his thighs and his head in his hands. He... feels empty, really, like he doesn't have the space or energy to grieve. He hasn't cried, hasn't really done much of anything, to be honest. His leg - and Kosmo - have kept him from the training sims, but that's only going to last so long. There haven't been any missions in the couple of days he's been awake, and Keith knows it's not really because of the fact that Lance died. It's because the rest of the paladins they _do_ have, have been asleep in pods until only recently.

And even then, Pidge still has a couple days to go. 

Kosmo lays at the end of his bed and sleeps, not interested in his personal feelings any more than she is with getting shut-eye. It feels like hours have passed by the time he gets a knock on the door.

Suddenly, Keith remembers when Shiro disappeared for the second time, and he was made the Black Paladin. He remembers when Lance had knocked on his door and waited patiently for Keith to open the door, and when he did, Lance looked... hesitant. Lost.

"Come in," Keith coughs, sitting up from where he had laid down previously. Coran walks in and, for a second Keith wonders if something is wrong, beause Coran never pays him visits in his room.

"Don't get all worked up, number four," he says, walking into the room, "I just wanted to talk about your leg."

Oh. "It's nothing, really-"

Coran waves his hand in a dismissal way and walks forward towards him, shutting him up. Kosmo snorts from where she lays next to him. "Is there any pain?" He asks, squatting in front of Keith's bed to take a better look at his leg, rolling the bottom of Keith's black pants up. 

"Sitting? No... not really," Keith says, only somewhat hesitantly. He doesn't really want to do this thing right now, and not in his room, but it's obvious Coran got fed up with Keith just ignoring it completely.

"And walking?"

"Yeah..."

Coran pokes and prods, mostly around his calve, around his knee. Keith - now no longer able to just ignore it - can see how it's not a normal color from the rest of his skin, can see how its blotched a light red here and there. "Well, you somehow got out of the pod early!" He says as if this fixes all of their problems. He doesn't comment on the discoloration of his calve. "You're bound to still suffer from your wounds. We can't throw you back in, I'm afraid," Coran stands up, his mustache twitching on his face which - whenever Coran does that, Keith just... doesn't like it. He wonders, briefly, how Coran gets his mustache to look the way it does. Some sort of gel? Lance would probably know. He probably would've been the one to give Coran the sculpting gel in the first place, had the met the alteans way back when.

"-antom pain, but we could still get you fixed up in a jiffy! We might be passing a planet I know very well, and they have some excellent witch doctors there-"

"Wait," Keith interrupts him, realizing what Coran is talking about when he finally pays attention to what the orange-haired man is saying. "Witch doctors? No, I don't need witch doctors-"

"Or I could order in some special medicine that would be sure to clear that up, yes I think I might do that," Coran continues talking over Keith, paying him no mind. "I have a couple favours to pull in," he nods to himself, standing up and giving a look to Keith's leg before exiting the room, listing of potential medicines. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've kinda just given up hope on this lol so like. I'm not actively trying to update this but if I do - like rn - then I do. I had a bunch of cool ideas for this story too. sucks man.


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